The SDE Compendium is a living library of Super Dungeon Explore character cards, hero guides, and reference material that includes every retail release by Soda Pop Miniatures. This is very much a community resource, so please check out the site and then swing by this thread and leave some feedback.

For a bit of fun during my train commute to and from work I have been building an online Hero Compendium for our favorite board-game. I know that there is a similar site for another great chibi game but I think we can do a little better for Super Dungeon Explore.

The site is now online and I would really appreciate some feedback and suggestions on how to make it better. More importantly, I need some community love to also source the missing hero cards or to find higher quality versions of the existing cards (the pets are the most desperate).

Some of those appear to be the pre-Forgotten King cards. Do you intend to update to the current version?

If someone were to scan their cards for you, what size and file type would you like, and how should they send them to you?

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

Most of the cards I sourced from the Kickstarter updates from Forgotten King, but I didn't think to check that they were the right version. So yeah, that one is my bad

As for community updates the key will be to make it as easy for people to contribute. So in your opinion, is email or a hosted image site like Imgur easier? Alternatively I'm up for trying Github to do it via pull-requests. There might even be a way to have the site auto-build on a timer from Github too.

With regards to card backs, I am not sure whether the Legal Ninjas will be happy with me including essentially everything you need to play the hero without buying the product. With only a handful of exceptions, most of the cards on Kickstarter do not include the back of the card. I therefore took my cue from that decision to avoid also hosting the reverse side of each card. That being said, there really is only one way to find out and I'll email the Ninja team to find out.

As for format, most of the cards sourced from Kickstarter are JPG with dimensions 400 x 560. The result is a very reasonable 130kb file. If I receive more community love then I am happy to put effort into updating the cards to a higher resolution. Perhaps one resolution used to expand the image, and a much higher one in print ready format that can be downloaded as a PDF.

With regards to card backs, I am not sure whether the Legal Ninjas will be happy with me including essentially everything you need to play the hero without buying the product. With only a handful of exceptions, most of the cards on Kickstarter do not include the back of the card. I therefore took my cue from that decision to avoid also hosting the reverse side of each card. That being said, there really is only one way to find out and I'll email the Ninja team to find out.

I checked with Deke. You're fine to post both the fronts and backs of the cards for your compendium.

edit: Is it just me, or does the pictures take quite some time to load when you click on a card?

edit 2: Personally I would much prefer you didn't have the view or download options when you hover over the thumbnails.You are not gonna want to download very often. If I were to decide I would prefer a visual indicator when you hover, like the image getting a border or turning brighter or bigger.And when you click anywhere on the picture you see the full card.

Just a suggestion - take it or leave it

Also, how about using the actual logo on top, rather than plain old text?

edit: Is it just me, or does the pictures take quite some time to load when you click on a card?

That is likely a combination of my web-host being in Australia and our Aussie net being not so great. It also doesn't help that each hero is a separate image that requires a separate connection to the server. I will look into different solutions to this after all the hero cards have been uploaded.

Goblin-King wrote:

edit 2: Personally I would much prefer you didn't have the view or download options when you hover over the thumbnails.You are not gonna want to download very often. If I were to decide I would prefer a visual indicator when you hover, like the image getting a border or turning brighter or bigger.And when you click anywhere on the picture you see the full card.

That is a good way to improve navigation, thanks!

What about loading the images in grey-scale, and then on hover they show the normal colour? That would also help to give the page a standardised, consistent appearance too.

Goblin-King wrote:

Just a suggestion - take it or leave it

Also, how about using the actual logo on top, rather than plain old text?

I am happy to take suggestions

As for the logo, given that Deke is so cool about my site then I think it will also be alright to also add the official logo.

Thank you to everyone that gave feedback. I'll add it all together and all things going well, should have version 2 online before next weekend.

That is likely a combination of my web-host being in Australia and our Aussie net being not so great. It also doesn't help that each hero is a separate image that requires a separate connection to the server. I will look into different solutions to this after all the hero cards have been uploaded.

God bless Australian Internet

Topher wrote:

What about loading the images in grey-scale, and then on hover they show the normal colour? That would also help to give the page a standardised, consistent appearance too.

In a way I think grey scale would be a shame. Looking at all the brightly colored heroes has a certain appeal. It also helps to quickly locate what you are looking for.Maybe just desaturate a bit for non-hover thumbs? Or as I suggested a colored border to show which one you are selecting? Or both. You can't really go too far regarding visual cues

Also if you want this to be the definitive go-to site, how about adding everything? Bosses, mini-bosses and monsters. Even spawnpoints!Whenever you want to look up any SDE character, everything would be collected in one place.

Also if you want this to be the definitive go-to site, how about adding everything? Bosses, mini-bosses and monsters. Even spawnpoints! Whenever you want to look up any SDE character, everything would be collected in one place.

Aww now you are just reading my mind

I started with just the heroes/pets to get the design, style and functionality correct. Once they are all good, then I will add in everything else that comes with a model or character card. From my count there are at least 237 models, which may be prohibitive number of images to load on a single page. So I would either need to either apologise up front for the quality of Aussie broadband or give each group a separate page.

Regardless of loading time, I'd probably still prefer separate pages as it would be too confusing with so many thumbs.Just make a couple of bars below the current "character type" bar and name that one "heroes".Then add:

Hey Lizardman, it is nice to come across another Aussie. As for your guess, you are half right. Yes I have an account there but like yours it is under a different name (Shiro). Your profile pic over on WargameAU looks very familiar so I would not be surprised if we have bought or sold something from each other in the distant past. I'm sure you have your own towering mountain of unpainted plastic and metal too.

Do you have this on a github repository?I'd be more than happy to help out.

Hey mate, thanks very much for the offer as I am sure more help will be useful moving forward. It is not up on Github yet but I plan on adding it once I have finished cleaning up the design and adding new card scans. Work is a bit cray-cray at the moment too so my efforts a little curtailed.

I tried removing the white space from each card corner and saving it as a transparent PNG but that quickly turned into a considerable time sink. So my new plan is to modify the image lightbox to have a white boarder. This effectively hides the round edge problem. It does however mean that I need to be careful about black lines around the card edges from positioning the card too close to the edge of the scanner bed. I'm keen to hear any thoughts on how it could be improved or more importantly made faster.

In other news I have updated the site to adopt the material design style (think Google apps etc), added a more obvious hover effect (@Goblin-King) and changed the image light-box to something that I believe better matches the SDE theme.

I'll put the new site online Friday and also upload the files to Github in case anyone wants to help out (and help is always welcome).

Oh and please raise your hand if you are a JQuery expert lurking around here. I could definitely use some help to refine the filter code to make the buttons function as toggles so that multiple items from each filter category can be selected at once. As a starting point the filter uses the plugin Isotope. Send me a PM if you think that sounds like your sort of thing.